Secret Window

Directed by David Koepp

Starring Johnny Depp John Turturro

Columbia

Rated PG-13

97 mins

Grade: B

Dawn of the Dead

Directed by Zack Snyder

Starring Sarah Polley Ving Rhames

Universal

Rated R

100 mins

Grade: A

It’s no secret that mainstream horror movies have long ago lost their ability to chill. They’ve been watered down to cater for the teen matinee market so much that when you see a hulking mad slasher like Michael Myers, he’s rendered as scary as a third-grader in a Halloween mask (and a cheap one at that.) Even Freddy Krueger, the demonic nighttime boogeyman, was turned into a sociopathic comedian; “Freddy vs. Jason” – in which Krueger squared off against Jason Voorhees, the ultimate stone-faced madman – was less a scary film than a hooting, hollering theme park ride.

“Secret Window,” in which Johnny Depp battles a menace in the wilderness, and “Dawn of the Dead,” a remake of the 1978 zombie classic, have both attempted to prove that even a Hollywood studio can make a horror film right. These films couldn’t be more different – one is a PG-13 friendly backwoods psycho-thriller and the other is a blood-spattered, big-budget gut-muncher – but they both have their moments of shuddery terror.

“Secret Window” is based on a novella by Stephen King and it’s one of those pulp suspense melodramas – like “Misery” and “The Dark Half” – that revisits the author’s pet theme of writers in trouble. The writer here is Mort Rainey (played by Depp in tousled, dirty-blonde, Cobainesque hair) a successful novelist wallowing away in self-pity after catching his wife (Maria Bello) in bed with another man (Timothy Hutton.) Rainey spends his days sleeping in a ratty bathrobe on the ratty couch in his wooded, lakeside vacation cabin, subsisting on a diet of Mountain Dew and Doritos. His favorite activity is in having an interior dialogue with himself.

Rainey is shaken out of his reverie by the arrival of John Shooter (John Turturro) a Southern-fried hick in an Amish cap with an accent as ripe as a yellow banana. Shooter stands on Rainey’s doorstep accusing the author of plagiarism. “You stole my stooreeee” Turturro drawls to convey menace (it works) and hands Rainey a manuscript all-too-similar to one of Rainey’s short fictions. Did Rainey steal Shooter’s story? Or is Shooter a nutcase stalker? The questions pile up – they’re pretty easy to answer – but it’s obvious that this won’t be the last we see of Shooter.

“Secret Window” has its share of dead bodies and last minute twists, but it’s safe to say that it’s not a film that breaks new thriller ground (I wouldn’t read the story before the movie.) The writer-director, David Koepp, has written a couple of decent thrillers in the past (“The Trigger Effect” and the great supernatural mystery “Stir of Echoes”) and he knows how to give a movie the extra charge. Here, he does that by giving Johnny Depp free range. The movie may have its moments, but it’s also not a very scary one; there’s no real sense of building dread here.

It is a consistently watchable lightweight horror yarn, stylishly made (dig that shuddery Phillip Glass score) and it’s given a jolt whenever Depp is on screen. As in “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” and “Once Upon A Time In Mexico,” Depp’s performance – a bravura, symphonic series of tics and twitches and deadpan comedy – elevates the material. Turturro, as the redneck stalker, plays off Depp’s opera beautifully (Bello and Hutton aren’t given nearly enough to do.) “Secret Window” may not be one of the better King films to come along in awhile, but it’s a film really owned by Depp and his offbeat charisma.

Zombies, with their rotting limbs and single-minded insistence, always used to be shambling, shabby ghouls – undead monsters with the knotty, blundering grace of a severe arthritic. It’s one of the singular appealing things about zombies that their pursuit of human prey was done with an awkward, stop-and-go shuffle. Today, in the pumped-up environs of blockbuster Hollywood, such a clumsy creature of hell would never fly. Modern zombies run, jump, chase and even swim with the rabid, hyper velocity of a steroidal athlete. In movies like Danny Boyle’s vivid, grainy, apocalypse-in-London thriller “28 Days Later” or the forceful new update of “Dawn of the Dead,” the zombies don’t stumble after you – they come at you with brutalizing force.

The new director of this “Dawn,” Zack Snyder, is one of those young gun filmmakers who worship at the altars of Craven, Carpenter and Romero. They know all too well the grammar of modern horror clich